Latest / Revisionist History / The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter

Transcript

The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter · Revisionist History

• 0:15
  Speaker 1: Bushkin.
• 0:22
  Speaker 2: I was a fan of John mcquarter long before I
• 0:24
  Speaker 2: met him for the first time. Mccorter is a linguist
• 0:27
  Speaker 2: at Columbia University and a music lover and a New
• 0:30
  Speaker 2: York Times columnist, basically a renaissance man. It was maybe
• 0:35
  Speaker 2: twenty nineteen when we first spoke. At the time, I
• 0:38
  Speaker 2: was working on something about Tom Bradley, who was mayor
• 0:41
  Speaker 2: of Los Angeles from nineteen seventy three to nineteen ninety three,
• 0:45
  Speaker 2: And while I listened to old tapes of Bradley, I
• 0:47
  Speaker 2: was struck by something I heard. Listen, there is nothing
• 0:51
  Speaker 2: there to hide.
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: I want everybody to know that Tom Bradley's life has
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: been an open book. And you know this is another
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: demonstration of that.
• 1:01
  Speaker 2: Tom Bradley is black, born in Texas, grew up in
• 1:05
  Speaker 2: south central Los Angeles. So I went to see mcquarter,
• 1:09
  Speaker 2: went to his rabbit warren of an office, played him
• 1:12
  Speaker 2: that bit of tape and said, explain this to me.
• 1:15
  Speaker 2: Why does a black guy whose parents were sharecroppers from
• 1:18
  Speaker 2: Texas sound like Carry Grant? And for an hour of
• 1:23
  Speaker 2: the most wonderful conversation he explained to me exactly why
• 1:27
  Speaker 2: he did. Fast forward a few years, I was doing
• 1:31
  Speaker 2: our series on the nineteen thirty six Olympics, and I
• 1:33
  Speaker 2: got obsessed with Dorothy Thompson, who was one of the
• 1:36
  Speaker 2: most important journalists in the world in the nineteen thirties.
• 1:40
  Speaker 2: And I heard some old tapes of her and she
• 1:42
  Speaker 2: sounded like she was the Duchess of York. Only do
• 1:46
  Speaker 2: you know where she grew up? Buffalo? So who do
• 1:49
  Speaker 2: I go to see to explain how people from Buffalo
• 1:51
  Speaker 2: end up sounding like English royalty? You guessed it, John
• 1:55
  Speaker 2: mc warter. My point is that there is a certain
• 1:59
  Speaker 2: kind of question about language, about race, about why we
• 2:03
  Speaker 2: speak the way we speak, for which the only answer is,
• 2:07
  Speaker 2: let's call up John mcquarter. I love John mcquarter and
• 2:12
  Speaker 2: when he said he had a new book coming out
• 2:14
  Speaker 2: called Pronoun Trouble, I asked him could I interview you
• 2:17
  Speaker 2: about it? And lucky for me, he said yes. My
• 2:23
  Speaker 2: name is Malcolm Gladwell. This is Revisionist History, my podcast
• 2:27
  Speaker 2: about things overlooked and misunderstood. In this episode, we're going
• 2:31
  Speaker 2: to run the conversation I had with Jah mcquarter this
• 2:34
  Speaker 2: spring at the ninety second Street Why, which was delightful.
• 2:41
  Speaker 2: I did this interview with John right after finishing up
• 2:43
  Speaker 2: the Joe Rogan episode of Revisionist History. If you listen
• 2:47
  Speaker 2: to it, you'll know that I spent a lot of
• 2:49
  Speaker 2: time talking about how to properly interview someone, how hard
• 2:53
  Speaker 2: it is, and how Joe Rogan could learn a lot
• 2:56
  Speaker 2: from someone like Oprah. And that episode was very much
• 2:59
  Speaker 2: on my mind as I was interviewing the quarter because
• 3:02
  Speaker 2: I was thinking, oh am I going to measure up.
• 3:05
  Speaker 2: Where do I land on the Oprah Joe Rogan continuum.
• 3:09
  Speaker 2: I'll let you be the judge of that. Although I
• 3:12
  Speaker 2: will say this is not exactly a fair test. The
• 3:15
  Speaker 2: degree of difficulty with interviewing someone as charming as John
• 3:19
  Speaker 2: mcwarter is very very hell hello everyone, thanks for coming, John,
• 3:29
  Speaker 2: Thank you for agreeing to join us tonight.
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: Malcolm, thank you for having me.
• 3:33
  Speaker 2: No the this is our I wanted to. I was
• 3:37
  Speaker 2: thinking back when I I first met you, and I
• 3:39
  Speaker 2: think it was I called you opera went to see
• 3:42
  Speaker 2: you because I was doing something on the first black
• 3:48
  Speaker 2: mayor of Los Angeles, Tom Bradley. It was Tom Bradley,
• 3:50
  Speaker 2: that's right, yeah, And I was listening to tapes of
• 3:52
  Speaker 2: him speaking and he sounded like the whitest guy I
• 3:55
  Speaker 2: could imagine and I was trying to.
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: Figure out why I sounded like a Disney announcer.
• 4:01
  Speaker 2: And you gave wait, tell me a little bit before
• 4:04
  Speaker 2: we even get into this. It was so much fun
• 4:06
  Speaker 2: your answer. Explain to me why that would be.
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: So I don't remember what I said then because it
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: was before you know what, and therefore it feels like
• 4:14
  Speaker 1: it was seventy five years ago. But I know that
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: I probably would have said that he would have grown
• 4:19
  Speaker 1: up in a time when the unspoken cultural expectations of
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: oratory culture were such that if you were trying to
• 4:27
  Speaker 1: make your way in the world, whatever color you are,
• 4:30
  Speaker 1: as an American, there was an expectation that you would
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: learn the standard dialect and be absolutely comfortable in it. Frankly,
• 4:38
  Speaker 1: Booker T. Washington did that too. He was born a slave.
• 4:40
  Speaker 1: If you listen to recordings, you'd think he was Teddy Roosevelt,
• 4:43
  Speaker 1: and that's because that's what you had to do, which
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: was kind of unfair. But I was thinking he comes
• 4:48
  Speaker 1: from the time when black people were expected to speak
• 4:52
  Speaker 1: that way if they wanted to have public influence. And
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: I'm sure that he spoke in different ways when he
• 4:58
  Speaker 1: did not have the camera on him, didn't I say
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: that I'm trying.
• 5:02
  Speaker 2: To say something along that lines, and we were the thing.
• 5:05
  Speaker 2: The fascinating question is when it did death stop? It stopped?
• 5:09
  Speaker 1: Yeah, he doesn't.
• 5:10
  Speaker 2: Sound like that if he's the mayor of Los Angeles today.
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: No. No, that ended in the late sixties, and there
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: was a new idea, and in some ways a healthy
• 5:17
  Speaker 1: idea that to be taken seriously. You don't have to
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: learn to talk in the standard way. You can express
• 5:23
  Speaker 1: yourself how you feel like it.
• 5:25
  Speaker 2: The minute I mentioned Tom Brady to you, you were like, oh,
• 5:29
  Speaker 2: I remember I played you with tape. You're like, oh,
• 5:31
  Speaker 2: And I realized, oh, this is old hat for John.
• 5:33
  Speaker 2: This is what it means to be a linguist. You're
• 5:35
  Speaker 2: constantly entertaining, asking yourself those kinds of questions. You can't
• 5:39
  Speaker 2: let a.
• 5:40
  Speaker 1: More or less. Yeah. Although I happen to be what's
• 5:44
  Speaker 1: called a historical linguist, which means that I'm interested in
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: how language changes, you can be somebody who's interested in
• 5:49
  Speaker 1: just how language is right now, in which case that
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: Tom Bradley question would be less of interest. But for me,
• 5:56
  Speaker 1: it's all about what was going on in the past,
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: and especially nowadays, we're at the point where you have
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: one hundred years it's actually technically one hundred and two
• 6:06
  Speaker 1: years of people recorded speaking and moving at the same time.
• 6:11
  Speaker 1: And so there's some sound films starting in nineteen twenty three,
• 6:15
  Speaker 1: and that to me is history, especially now that we've
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: got the Internet and so you can just see these
• 6:19
  Speaker 1: things happening and you can listen to the way people talk,
• 6:22
  Speaker 1: and so that's something I do. Not all linguists would
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: be inclined to do that. They would do other interesting things,
• 6:27
  Speaker 1: but it's a little obsession of mine, especially lately. How
• 6:30
  Speaker 1: has American English changed over about the past one hundred
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: and twenty five years. When you can actually hear it,
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: you can listen to this won't go on for too
• 6:38
  Speaker 1: much longer, but you can listen to the black musical
• 6:42
  Speaker 1: theater artist Bert Williams, who has a certain name, but
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: he first became famous working with George Walker. They're two
• 6:48
  Speaker 1: black men. You can see them in pictures and you
• 6:50
  Speaker 1: know they've got the minstrel makeup and they're in these
• 6:53
  Speaker 1: forced poses and you kind of think, what were they
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: like and it's hard to tell. There's some recordings of them,
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: there are a few, and they're like like that. You
• 7:01
  Speaker 1: can listen to the way they spoke and sang. They
• 7:04
  Speaker 1: both sound Caribbean, including George Walker who grew up in Kansas,
• 7:09
  Speaker 1: because Black English vowels were different back then. If you
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: listen to black people on cylinders from the eighteen nineties
• 7:15
  Speaker 1: and then then they don't say quote, they say quote
• 7:18
  Speaker 1: like that somebody's gonna marry me. Somebody's going to marry me.
• 7:22
  Speaker 1: That's how they sounded. And so these are the obsessions
• 7:25
  Speaker 1: that one starts to have.
• 7:27
  Speaker 2: When you say you have but this sounds like a
• 7:31
  Speaker 2: fantastic obsession. By the way, how does that like? Is
• 7:35
  Speaker 2: this something you do sort of for fun? In other words,
• 7:38
  Speaker 2: do you have places you go to find these historical
• 7:43
  Speaker 2: or are you just watching a movie from the thirties
• 7:45
  Speaker 2: and you stop it and you go back five minutes
• 7:48
  Speaker 2: and you lay up on.
• 7:49
  Speaker 1: Both of those things. Yeah, and it's not only black people,
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: it's just people in general. Listen to that vowel. Why
• 7:55
  Speaker 1: did the person use the word fantastical in that particular way.
• 7:59
  Speaker 1: There are all sorts of things, and then like, do
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: I go looking for it? Not necessarily, but if I
• 8:03
  Speaker 1: find out that there is some four CD player set
• 8:08
  Speaker 1: called Sad of the deep past. The first thing I'm
• 8:12
  Speaker 1: thinking is how interesting could most of that be? But
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: there'll be two things where somebody is black or somebody
• 8:17
  Speaker 1: is using something colloquial. And so I'll listen to all
• 8:20
  Speaker 1: four of those damn CDs once because you never know
• 8:23
  Speaker 1: what you're gonna get, and you get just enough to
• 8:26
  Speaker 1: put into books and to mention to you and things
• 8:28
  Speaker 1: like that.
• 8:29
  Speaker 2: So when did you when did you, at what point
• 8:32
  Speaker 2: in your in your career life, whatever, did you realize
• 8:37
  Speaker 2: that this was something of particular interest to you?
• 8:40
  Speaker 1: You mean linguistics in general.
• 8:42
  Speaker 2: No, No, this thing you're just talking about that.
• 8:46
  Speaker 1: It's a summer day in nineteen seventy five and my
• 8:53
  Speaker 1: father's got his beer and he's watching this bad old
• 8:56
  Speaker 1: movie and it was a movie biography, old one of
• 9:01
  Speaker 1: Stephen Foster, and the people keep walking through and they
• 9:06
  Speaker 1: the vowels are different, and I'm gonna write swanee River.
• 9:09
  Speaker 1: And I asked d why did they talk that way?
• 9:12
  Speaker 1: And he said, well, you know, things change, and that's
• 9:15
  Speaker 1: about all he had. But I remember thinking those were
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: real people and yet they don't talk like us. Why?
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: And then a seed was gradually planted. There's an episode
• 9:27
  Speaker 1: of I've ever spoken about this. There's an episode of
• 9:30
  Speaker 1: the Lucy Show, not I Love Lucy, but her second
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: show that got bad. And in one of the early episodes,
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: Lucy gets a maid and the maid is snobbish, and
• 9:40
  Speaker 1: so Lucy starts buying the maid lunch and at one
• 9:43
  Speaker 1: point she says, Oh, it's a roast chicken. It's broasted.
• 9:46
  Speaker 1: And she says, it's broasted. And I was listening to
• 9:48
  Speaker 1: that when I was about thirteen and thinking, that's not
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: a word anymore. Is it? That sort of thing for
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: some reason interests me? And next thing, you know, you've
• 9:56
  Speaker 1: got so much of it stuck crowding out more important
• 9:59
  Speaker 1: things in your head. But you can write books about.
• 10:02
  Speaker 2: It, John, you gotta do better than that. You can't
• 10:05
  Speaker 2: say for some reason it interested me. You got to
• 10:07
  Speaker 2: tell me good, tell us more than that.
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: The way people talk is very resonant to me. And
• 10:15
  Speaker 1: as I've gotten older, I've realized that for other people
• 10:17
  Speaker 1: it's the way people walk, or the way somebody dances,
• 10:20
  Speaker 1: of the way people dress. But I know from a
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: very early age just speech was interesting. It was a
• 10:26
  Speaker 1: window into the soul. People spoke differently, and that was
• 10:31
  Speaker 1: about this much blackness. It was just listening to people
• 10:34
  Speaker 1: in general, getting a sense that my teachers had a
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: certain accent that the white people on TV didn't have.
• 10:40
  Speaker 1: In Philadelphia, you say lousy whereas Lucy says lousy. And
• 10:44
  Speaker 1: I was thinking, well, that's interesting, annoying my southern relatives
• 10:49
  Speaker 1: by noticing that they had different vocabulary here and there.
• 10:51
  Speaker 1: You know, I'm this little kid, I talk like missed
• 10:54
  Speaker 1: and I say, you say Carrie when we would say take,
• 10:56
  Speaker 1: and they would get tired of that. But I realized
• 10:59
  Speaker 1: that it was because I was interested in dialect. Also,
• 11:06
  Speaker 1: one thing I missed, and I think it's partly from
• 11:08
  Speaker 1: being black, is I never heard Black English as wrong.
• 11:12
  Speaker 1: I didn't grow up speaking it. I grew up hearing it.
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: I have a good passive competence. But I remember cousins
• 11:17
  Speaker 1: who you know very much, spoke it and they would
• 11:19
  Speaker 1: use features of Black English, and I would listen and
• 11:22
  Speaker 1: not think nothing. You know, some people just not care.
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: I would not think that's bad grammar, that's wrong. I
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: wouldn't think it was exotic. I would listen to it
• 11:32
  Speaker 1: and think, hmm, that's different from the way I would
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: put it, And I wonder, why is that based on
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: something in history. I had one cousin who was using
• 11:41
  Speaker 1: what we call the narrative, had people who studied Black
• 11:43
  Speaker 1: English and so, and then we had gone downstairs, and
• 11:46
  Speaker 1: then we had seen that there was a raccoon in
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: the basement, and then we had said, hey, let's get
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: rid of that raccoon. And then we had gone back upstairs.
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: And I keep waiting for you had what, and then what,
• 11:54
  Speaker 1: and it was just all had And I remember listening
• 11:56
  Speaker 1: to Darren doing that and thinking that must be different
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: instead of him not knowing what had means. And then
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: years later I found out that linguist had written about that.
• 12:05
  Speaker 2: Wait, my wife, who's black, Uh, she uses that. That's
• 12:11
  Speaker 2: where it comes from. What she sticks head in the
• 12:14
  Speaker 2: craziest places.
• 12:16
  Speaker 1: It might be a black thing, yes, or like when
• 12:19
  Speaker 1: Will Smith says, well, what had happened was he's.
• 12:22
  Speaker 2: What she did?
• 12:23
  Speaker 1: Yeah?
• 12:23
  Speaker 2: She said today she said, I had went. I don't
• 12:27
  Speaker 2: understand this is a highly educated went to Princeton lawyer
• 12:33
  Speaker 2: in she just takes head and just kind of like
• 12:36
  Speaker 2: shovels it in randomly into her senses.
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: That is, that is because it's a good, earthy yet
• 12:42
  Speaker 1: systematic way of using using the language. It's called narrative had.
• 12:47
  Speaker 1: There are papers about it, noticeably papers. There's one paper
• 12:50
  Speaker 1: about it.
• 12:50
  Speaker 2: So her father, wait, I want to her father grew
• 12:54
  Speaker 2: up in both Harlem and Jacksonville, Florida, and he would
• 12:58
  Speaker 2: be growing up in the fifties.
• 13:01
  Speaker 1: He would have gotten that narrative had from Harlem, most
• 13:04
  Speaker 1: likely from Harlem. Yeah, that's good, solid northern Black English. Yeah.
• 13:08
  Speaker 2: Now you said something earlier that you didn't speak Black
• 13:13
  Speaker 2: English growing up.
• 13:14
  Speaker 1: Why not? That's deep, Malcolm. Actually, that gets into my
• 13:19
  Speaker 1: parents and what they were like, and so plenty of
• 13:24
  Speaker 1: black family speaking the dialect fluently. Mount Area in Philadelphia
• 13:28
  Speaker 1: was a very integrated neighborhood. The black people in the
• 13:31
  Speaker 1: neighborhood had become middle class from mostly being working class.
• 13:35
  Speaker 1: So there was plenty of Black English spoken in the neighborhood.
• 13:37
  Speaker 1: Close friends of mine spoke it. My mother grew up
• 13:40
  Speaker 1: speaking Southern Black English, but switched to a kind of
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: generalized suburban Northern when she moved to Philadelphia. My father
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: spoke Philadelphia Black English. But and this is something I
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: really have only wrapped my head around over the past
• 13:55
  Speaker 1: about year really thinking about it. They were not inclined
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: to use their vernacular around their kids. They didn't speak
• 14:04
  Speaker 1: it to us. I remember thinking, Mom gets on the
• 14:06
  Speaker 1: phone with her relatives and all of a sudden, there's
• 14:08
  Speaker 1: this other way she has of speaking. I was trying
• 14:10
  Speaker 1: to wrap my head around it. Whereas, to tell you
• 14:13
  Speaker 1: the truth, most black moms would have spoken that way,
• 14:16
  Speaker 1: at least some to their kids as well. And the
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: truth is both of my parents tried their best. They
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: were both brilliant people. They provided a materially great existence,
• 14:24
  Speaker 1: but they were both very closed off people in general,
• 14:28
  Speaker 1: and that played out in terms of dialect. Then also,
• 14:32
  Speaker 1: my sister talks exactly like me. If I have a
• 14:34
  Speaker 1: weird voice, as one other person, it's my sister who's
• 14:36
  Speaker 1: four years younger, and she sounds just like this. So
• 14:38
  Speaker 1: it was it was both of us, and I find
• 14:41
  Speaker 1: myself thinking, sometimes we both do that. But also I'm not.
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: I'm not an imitator, you know, as much as I
• 14:48
  Speaker 1: love other languages and trying to learn them and never
• 14:51
  Speaker 1: never doing it as well as I'd like to. Holly,
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: my sister went to Spelman and came back with this
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: new repertoire. All of a sudden she could switch. She
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: had a kind of black English, she had the cadence,
• 15:02
  Speaker 1: whereas I never did that. And to be honest, if
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: I had gone to morehouse, I don't think that would
• 15:06
  Speaker 1: have happened. I talk the way I talk in other
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: people imitate me, and I think that's just you know,
• 15:11
  Speaker 1: neurons or something. You know. I like the way I talk.
• 15:15
  Speaker 1: I'm not going to talk like someone else. But that
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: is the reason. And I wish that I had picked
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: it up for real, because not having that natural competence
• 15:26
  Speaker 1: means that you come off sometimes as thinking you're better
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: than people when really it's just that that's not in
• 15:31
  Speaker 1: your mouth. And I can completely understand what it would
• 15:33
  Speaker 1: look like from another perspective, but yeah, that's it sometimes.
• 15:37
  Speaker 1: To be honest, I have wished that I was and
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: I'm not just saying this because it's you, except I am.
• 15:42
  Speaker 1: I wish that I was Black Canadian because I think
• 15:45
  Speaker 1: that's less of an issue there in terms of the
• 15:48
  Speaker 1: place of American Black English in what it is to
• 15:51
  Speaker 1: be a black person. But that's just an idle thought.
• 15:54
  Speaker 2: I remember the first time I saw that kind of
• 15:59
  Speaker 2: the switching as a kid in Jamaica, seeing my uncle,
• 16:06
  Speaker 2: you know, a brown skin Jamaican talked to us in
• 16:10
  Speaker 2: the Queen's English, and he was getting gas, had a
• 16:14
  Speaker 2: gas pump.
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: That was amazing.
• 16:17
  Speaker 2: I'm maybe nine, gets out of the car and he
• 16:20
  Speaker 2: starts talking to the guy pumping the gas, and there's
• 16:22
  Speaker 2: some It wasn't just that he switched into Patuas, it
• 16:28
  Speaker 2: was that he also his manner.
• 16:30
  Speaker 1: Completely changed you a different person.
• 16:32
  Speaker 2: He was there. They were doing that Jamaican thing where
• 16:34
  Speaker 2: they're shouting at each other even though they're not angry, yes,
• 16:39
  Speaker 2: which I'd never seen before. I thought, this is the
• 16:41
  Speaker 2: coolest thing I've ever seen in my entire life. That
• 16:43
  Speaker 2: he could go from literally Malcolm blah blah blah and
• 16:46
  Speaker 2: then boom, and it was just that kind of.
• 16:49
  Speaker 1: And that kind of trash talking thing, just like their
• 16:52
  Speaker 1: papers written about that one. Actually, yeah, that is that
• 16:56
  Speaker 1: is very common. That must have been wild. Yeah, especially
• 16:59
  Speaker 1: to see that big a switch, because in my case
• 17:01
  Speaker 1: it was like from here to here. But with Patuas,
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: first he's Margaret Thatcher and then suddenly he's Bob Marley.
• 17:07
  Speaker 1: That must have been.
• 17:10
  Speaker 2: Or my mother hearing my then I began to hear
• 17:12
  Speaker 2: my mother when she would get angry, she would lapse,
• 17:16
  Speaker 2: not into full on bad way. But you could hear
• 17:19
  Speaker 2: the Jamaican coming out of that idea as well. It's
• 17:22
  Speaker 2: funny because I'm making the same on some level observations
• 17:26
  Speaker 2: you are as a child, but I have no I
• 17:29
  Speaker 2: what sidetracks me at that age is not how people
• 17:32
  Speaker 2: are speaking, but how they're telling, how they're explaining things.
• 17:37
  Speaker 2: I get obsessed in the same way that you. I
• 17:39
  Speaker 2: think it's funny, in the same way that you got
• 17:41
  Speaker 2: obsessed with how your people are expressing themselves. To me,
• 17:45
  Speaker 2: it was about we're we're gonna we're playing hearts, and
• 17:49
  Speaker 2: our cousin doesn't know how to play hearts, and my
• 17:52
  Speaker 2: brother's starts expanding hearts to my cousin. He's doing it
• 17:54
  Speaker 2: all wrong. That was my obsessions. I'm sick. I'm just like, why,
• 17:59
  Speaker 2: why start with the point of the game, like, what
• 18:03
  Speaker 2: are you doing?
• 18:04
  Speaker 3: Yeah? And I realized how deeply kind of and it
• 18:09
  Speaker 3: bothered you. Oh to this day it works.
• 18:13
  Speaker 1: I always just assumed that people were going to do
• 18:18
  Speaker 1: stuff wrong, and I would have been listening to what
• 18:20
  Speaker 1: the grammar was.
• 18:22
  Speaker 2: No, no, no, I uh. If the surest way for me
• 18:25
  Speaker 2: to completely lose my cool is to read instructions that
• 18:30
  Speaker 2: someone has written for something just like this is this
• 18:33
  Speaker 2: is I mean, come on, I want to call up
• 18:36
  Speaker 2: the company and volunteer my services. We'll be right back
• 18:40
  Speaker 2: with more of my conversation with John McCarter. I want
• 18:52
  Speaker 2: to talk a little bit about your and by the way,
• 18:56
  Speaker 2: I always find this question, if it's asked to me,
• 18:58
  Speaker 2: deeply annoying, so you don't have to answer it if
• 18:59
  Speaker 2: you don't want to. But I wanted to talk about
• 19:01
  Speaker 2: your kind of place in the culture right now, which
• 19:05
  Speaker 2: is really interesting to me. And I have a grand,
• 19:08
  Speaker 2: unified a quarter theory.
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: I want to hear this because I don't.
• 19:13
  Speaker 2: Here's my theory. At any given moment, in sort of
• 19:18
  Speaker 2: popular culture or intellectual popular culture, there is someone who's
• 19:22
  Speaker 2: allowed to get away with saying anything. You that person.
• 19:27
  Speaker 2: I think you get to say whatever you want for
• 19:32
  Speaker 2: a variety of reasons, which i'd like you to unpack.
• 19:34
  Speaker 1: Can you give me Can you give me one half
• 19:38
  Speaker 1: of an example of what you mean? Like, I'm allowed
• 19:41
  Speaker 1: to say it, but no one else is.
• 19:44
  Speaker 2: As in, you wrote a beautiful was it or not bad?
• 19:48
  Speaker 2: I can't remember where you wrote it? A thing about
• 19:51
  Speaker 2: your own experience with affirmative action, Yes, no, one else
• 19:53
  Speaker 2: could write that.
• 19:55
  Speaker 1: True.
• 19:57
  Speaker 2: You write about you in your column are constantly, in
• 20:04
  Speaker 2: a very beautiful way, kind of setting down the rules
• 20:07
  Speaker 2: for discourse, particularly around your code switching column of yesterday,
• 20:13
  Speaker 2: like all right, not allowed to do that? You know
• 20:15
  Speaker 2: this way?
• 20:17
  Speaker 1: You must forget them the minute I write them this today?
• 20:20
  Speaker 1: Oh today is what's her name? The Congress from Jasmine Crockett. Yes, okay,
• 20:25
  Speaker 1: Jasmon Crockett. You said, very gently and nicely, you said
• 20:28
  Speaker 1: to her, come on, now, you get to do that.
• 20:31
  Speaker 1: I do you know what?
• 20:33
  Speaker 2: Who else can do that?
• 20:36
  Speaker 1: What you're saying is something I'm feeling as I get
• 20:39
  Speaker 1: a little older, because I'm pushing sixty and so I'm
• 20:42
  Speaker 1: no longer the young pup, and i feel like I've
• 20:46
  Speaker 1: got a certain amount of life experience, and also just
• 20:49
  Speaker 1: I'm beginning to come off as the kind of person
• 20:51
  Speaker 1: who you call sir or in the parking lot, okay, boss,
• 20:56
  Speaker 1: you know that sort of thing, And so I'm beginning
• 20:59
  Speaker 1: to take those chances to an extent with Jasmine Crockett.
• 21:04
  Speaker 1: I will say this, I was very careful in the
• 21:07
  Speaker 1: wording of that because I thought, especially because she's forty
• 21:11
  Speaker 1: in a bit and I'm about to be sixty. I male,
• 21:14
  Speaker 1: I have an imperious demeanor. I don't think that she
• 21:17
  Speaker 1: did anything that was absolutely sinful, and so honestly, in
• 21:20
  Speaker 1: the editing of that, we were very careful with the words,
• 21:23
  Speaker 1: and so near the end of it, I say that
• 21:24
  Speaker 1: her explanation for why she made fun of the man
• 21:27
  Speaker 1: in the wheelchair was what did I call it, I'm
• 21:31
  Speaker 1: clever but hopeless. And there was an idea that I
• 21:36
  Speaker 1: was supposed to say clever but cowardly, and I said, no,
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: that's too mean. I don't want to call her a coward.
• 21:43
  Speaker 1: I want to say that the explanation just doesn't work.
• 21:45
  Speaker 1: So I think part of it, but the fact that
• 21:47
  Speaker 1: I wrote that at all, I don't know if I
• 21:49
  Speaker 1: would have written that one twenty years ago, or if
• 21:51
  Speaker 1: I did, it would have been read as John just
• 21:54
  Speaker 1: likes to criticize black people, and he does that every week,
• 21:56
  Speaker 1: when I actually do it very rarely. But I think
• 21:58
  Speaker 1: what you're talking about is that I'm getting a little
• 22:01
  Speaker 1: older and therefore feel like I can say things that
• 22:05
  Speaker 1: I couldn't when I was Coleman Hughes's age like thirty,
• 22:08
  Speaker 1: where if I say things even if I thought I
• 22:10
  Speaker 1: was right, it would be you're too young, how dare you?
• 22:13
  Speaker 1: And I really felt at the time, I need to
• 22:15
  Speaker 1: respect my elders. I would try very hard to do that,
• 22:18
  Speaker 1: especially in Black American culture. Don't you don't sass your elders,
• 22:22
  Speaker 1: You don't sass your parents. Well, now I'm my parents,
• 22:26
  Speaker 1: and so I'm going to start doing some constructive sassing.
• 22:29
  Speaker 1: I think that's part of.
• 22:29
  Speaker 2: It, part of it as well. I think there's other layers. Well,
• 22:35
  Speaker 2: one is that as a linguist, as someone who pays
• 22:38
  Speaker 2: as much attention to language as you do, you're better
• 22:43
  Speaker 2: at it.
• 22:44
  Speaker 1: I don't. I'm not.
• 22:47
  Speaker 2: By which I mean that. Just the example you just
• 22:50
  Speaker 2: gave on parsing the difference between cowardly and hopeless, that
• 22:57
  Speaker 2: someone who was not as attuned to the nuances of
• 23:00
  Speaker 2: language might have said cowardly with a quite a you know,
• 23:04
  Speaker 2: there's quite a dramatic difference in the way that would
• 23:07
  Speaker 2: be perceived and read. Yeah, and you're but you are
• 23:11
  Speaker 2: professionally alert to those nuances, and that permits you a
• 23:15
  Speaker 2: great deal more freedom. I think that most people dramatically
• 23:19
  Speaker 2: underestimate how important word choice is and how acutely sensitive
• 23:24
  Speaker 2: we are to the word the words that are used,
• 23:26
  Speaker 2: particularly if they're directed at us. I want to talk
• 23:28
  Speaker 2: about my favorite chapter.
• 23:29
  Speaker 1: In the book. What's the favorite.
• 23:31
  Speaker 2: It's the it's the chapter about you.
• 23:33
  Speaker 1: Thank you for not being about they and them? Okay you, Yeah,
• 23:37
  Speaker 1: that was the one that was the funnest to write.
• 23:39
  Speaker 2: It's the fun it is, so just sit to work.
• 23:42
  Speaker 2: Explain briefly to everyone the structure of the book.
• 23:47
  Speaker 1: The book is. It's not just a book about they.
• 23:49
  Speaker 1: I mean there. I think there already is a book
• 23:51
  Speaker 1: just about they. I couldn't have sustained anyone's attention for
• 23:54
  Speaker 1: that long. It's each pronoun So there's I, there's you,
• 23:57
  Speaker 1: there's he, she, it, there's we, and there's a. So
• 24:00
  Speaker 1: that's seven chapters. Notice that it's a compact and the
• 24:03
  Speaker 1: idea is to give the history of each one of
• 24:05
  Speaker 1: those little words, and then to discuss some controversy that
• 24:09
  Speaker 1: is connected with them. We kind of resist controversy. That
• 24:12
  Speaker 1: chapter was a challenge because I was thinking, nobody fights
• 24:15
  Speaker 1: over week. But I got a chapter out of it anyway.
• 24:17
  Speaker 1: But that was the point. And of course, when I
• 24:21
  Speaker 1: was writing it in twenty twenty three on a sun
• 24:24
  Speaker 1: porch Upstate, I was thinking ha ha, happy linguistic pronouns,
• 24:28
  Speaker 1: because the book before this was called wok Racism, and
• 24:32
  Speaker 1: it was a bourbon fueled, angry little screed that needed
• 24:36
  Speaker 1: to be written in twenty twenty. But it's this book
• 24:39
  Speaker 1: where I'm screaming on every page, and books like that
• 24:41
  Speaker 1: are not fun to write. So after that was over,
• 24:44
  Speaker 1: I thought, I want to do one of the happy
• 24:45
  Speaker 1: language books, and I thought, what about the pronouns. The
• 24:48
  Speaker 1: last thing I was thinking was all of this debate
• 24:50
  Speaker 1: we're having now about TRANSI identity, et cetera. I was
• 24:52
  Speaker 1: just writing about pronouns. So the book has fallen into
• 24:55
  Speaker 1: a different atmosphere than I was expecting. But really it's
• 24:58
  Speaker 1: just me enjoying pronouns. Like in Nine Nasty Words, I
• 25:02
  Speaker 1: enjoyed profanity. That's what this book is.
• 25:04
  Speaker 2: But you so tell us, tell us the problem with you.
• 25:09
  Speaker 1: You is a problem. I don't mean that you all
• 25:11
  Speaker 1: are a problem. Oh there was some Black English too,
• 25:15
  Speaker 1: We will get there. That was silly. So it used
• 25:19
  Speaker 1: to be yeah, exactly exactly, Thou Malcolm as opposed to
• 25:22
  Speaker 1: you in the audience. That's how English is supposed to be.
• 25:26
  Speaker 1: Thou art sitting in a chair. You are sitting. To
• 25:29
  Speaker 1: be honest, with the lighting, I can't tell what you're
• 25:31
  Speaker 1: sitting in, but I presume they are chairs, and so
• 25:33
  Speaker 1: thou and you. You're supposed to have singular and then
• 25:37
  Speaker 1: a plural one. In early Middle English and before there
• 25:41
  Speaker 1: was a duel. So if it's just you too, then
• 25:43
  Speaker 1: it was yeat and so thou, yeat and you, And
• 25:47
  Speaker 1: then they had case forms thou if it's subject, thee.
• 25:50
  Speaker 1: If it's an object, you was the object form. Ye
• 25:54
  Speaker 1: was the subject form like here yea and then yeat
• 25:57
  Speaker 1: didn't do that, but the possessive of yeat. If you
• 25:59
  Speaker 1: wanted to say, you two's book, ink book, get that
• 26:03
  Speaker 1: and so got it wrong. No, ink was the object
• 26:06
  Speaker 1: form yeat and then ink. So I've done it all
• 26:09
  Speaker 1: for you too, my children, I've done it all for ink.
• 26:12
  Speaker 1: Inkor was the possessive. So you had all of these
• 26:14
  Speaker 1: U forms and everything's chugging along, and today all we
• 26:18
  Speaker 1: have is you, not even ye and you, just you.
• 26:21
  Speaker 1: Thou is gone, know thee just you? It all just
• 26:24
  Speaker 1: falls away now is the one we miss. It's like
• 26:26
  Speaker 1: I had a disease. Yeah, that was the one we miss.
• 26:28
  Speaker 1: We need thou, we need that we need it back
• 26:31
  Speaker 1: right now, but now we can't. We can't do it now.
• 26:35
  Speaker 2: So let's convince us about why we need to have
• 26:39
  Speaker 2: thou back.
• 26:41
  Speaker 1: Well, if you think about it, if you're going from
• 26:43
  Speaker 1: English to almost any language you're likely to learn. Notice
• 26:47
  Speaker 1: the first thing you learn is that there's something like
• 26:49
  Speaker 1: dot and then there's some plural form. You never learned
• 26:52
  Speaker 1: that the word for you is the same both in
• 26:55
  Speaker 1: the singular. If there's a chart in front of you,
• 26:56
  Speaker 1: the singular and the plural. That's not how languages work.
• 27:00
  Speaker 1: And so all over Europe this is preserved. This difference
• 27:03
  Speaker 1: is preserved. There are different spheres of influence that it
• 27:06
  Speaker 1: has in different languages and at different times. But if
• 27:08
  Speaker 1: it's Rush, it's supposed to be THEE and lie. You
• 27:11
  Speaker 1: don't have lee used for everything. You don't have THEE
• 27:13
  Speaker 1: use for everything. English is different in that way. English
• 27:16
  Speaker 1: is a very odd language in certain corners of its being.
• 27:21
  Speaker 1: And to tell the truth, it's it's obscure. We need
• 27:25
  Speaker 1: a singular versus a plural form. And we try to
• 27:27
  Speaker 1: create a plural form by saying y'all or use or
• 27:30
  Speaker 1: yen's and we're told that that's just funny. It's just slang.
• 27:35
  Speaker 1: It smells like fish or bubblegum or marijuana. It's not
• 27:38
  Speaker 1: it's not a real word. And yet all we're trying
• 27:41
  Speaker 1: to do is be a normal language.
• 27:44
  Speaker 2: So what's your preference here? There's two there's two parallel
• 27:48
  Speaker 2: strends of argument here, and I want to figure out
• 27:49
  Speaker 2: which side you're on. So you originally is the plural,
• 27:53
  Speaker 2: that is the singular singular. What has happened is that
• 27:58
  Speaker 2: you has come to encompass both, and we've developed these
• 28:02
  Speaker 2: colloquial forms y'all, et cetera, to take up the plural position,
• 28:08
  Speaker 2: and we we've moved you to the singular. Do you
• 28:12
  Speaker 2: think you should remain the singular or should you be
• 28:15
  Speaker 2: moved back into the plural position?
• 28:19
  Speaker 1: I understand. I'd like to see thou come back. I
• 28:22
  Speaker 1: think we need thou. There was nothing wrong with it.
• 28:25
  Speaker 1: It's just like German, do we need thou? The problem
• 28:29
  Speaker 1: is that Thou sounds antique. Thou sounds like somebody in
• 28:32
  Speaker 1: a periwig who's about to die of yellow fever because
• 28:35
  Speaker 1: it's so far back. But if we bring in you,
• 28:37
  Speaker 1: then we have to accept y'all as legitimate, or you
• 28:41
  Speaker 1: guys or use And that's really tough too, because of
• 28:45
  Speaker 1: the aforesaid odors of those words.
• 28:47
  Speaker 2: Why did I was thinking of?
• 28:49
  Speaker 1: You know?
• 28:50
  Speaker 2: So if someone wrote the hymn how great Thou art today,
• 28:52
  Speaker 2: it would be how great you.
• 28:53
  Speaker 1: Are, how great you are?
• 28:54
  Speaker 2: And say it's not it's not as good God to thee,
• 28:59
  Speaker 2: how great you are you are? It doesn't work.
• 29:05
  Speaker 1: That was great for art, yeah, but art thou. But
• 29:10
  Speaker 1: it would be hard to use out on the street,
• 29:12
  Speaker 1: I think, do I say it in the book? No,
• 29:15
  Speaker 1: that was about something else. You could not say thou naked?
• 29:20
  Speaker 1: You know it just it wouldn't seem quite right. It
• 29:22
  Speaker 1: was I have to use you.
• 29:26
  Speaker 2: But no, you've said the problems with both positions. But
• 29:29
  Speaker 2: come on, you're not answering my question.
• 29:31
  Speaker 1: Try if you had to.
• 29:33
  Speaker 2: If I make you languages are and you get to
• 29:36
  Speaker 2: push you to the singular a pro position and either
• 29:40
  Speaker 2: reinstate thou or or establish use and y'all, which what
• 29:49
  Speaker 2: which move were you making?
• 29:50
  Speaker 1: If I were the czar, like if I could do
• 29:52
  Speaker 1: an executive order, and yeah, I would, you would be
• 29:57
  Speaker 1: in the singular and I would enforce that you all
• 30:00
  Speaker 1: was more widely accepted. I would say that the Wall
• 30:03
  Speaker 1: Street Journal has to start allowing you all, and it
• 30:05
  Speaker 1: has to start being taught in school with a teacher
• 30:08
  Speaker 1: with a stick at a black That's that's the way
• 30:10
  Speaker 1: I would do it Already. When I teach about language,
• 30:13
  Speaker 1: I say it's going to be I U he she
• 30:15
  Speaker 1: we y'all. They I always say that because you need
• 30:18
  Speaker 1: you need a y'all. Yeah. That center.
• 30:20
  Speaker 2: One of the things that it had not occurred to
• 30:21
  Speaker 2: me until I read that chapter was that in the South,
• 30:26
  Speaker 2: y'all is only is the plural, that is to say,
• 30:30
  Speaker 2: and if it is, if it's addressed to a person
• 30:33
  Speaker 2: you're invoking. Isn't that nice to see in others? I
• 30:36
  Speaker 2: hadn't realized it. So if I go to the South,
• 30:38
  Speaker 2: then I say, well, ye, that's what y'all think, and
• 30:42
  Speaker 2: I mean just you, Yeah, I've committed a violation.
• 30:45
  Speaker 1: Yeah, because they don't use it to mean the singular.
• 30:48
  Speaker 1: But when they say it's one person, you're at a
• 30:50
  Speaker 1: seven eleven and somebody says, y'all come back, that doesn't
• 30:54
  Speaker 1: mean y'all that one person right there. It means it's
• 30:58
  Speaker 1: implying that there's somebody out there in the car or
• 31:00
  Speaker 1: something which is is the following. It's a politeness strategy.
• 31:04
  Speaker 1: So with du and VU, you can address a single
• 31:07
  Speaker 1: person as VU as if they're people, and so you're
• 31:10
  Speaker 1: not hitting the person like this. If you say y'all
• 31:13
  Speaker 1: come back now, you're kind of saying voo come back now,
• 31:16
  Speaker 1: You're you're taking away the directness to say you you
• 31:19
  Speaker 1: one individual, I hope you come back and buy another
• 31:21
  Speaker 1: slim gym. It's a little direct as opposed to y'all
• 31:25
  Speaker 1: come back. It's a very courtly thing that y'all.
• 31:29
  Speaker 2: I want to go back to something you said. Well,
• 31:31
  Speaker 2: we need to distinguish between the plural and singular you.
• 31:36
  Speaker 2: But what problem does it create for as when we can't.
• 31:39
  Speaker 2: Is it just a lack of specificity.
• 31:41
  Speaker 1: It's just that you need to pause and clean something up.
• 31:45
  Speaker 1: And you'd rather not have to imagine never having to
• 31:47
  Speaker 1: say I don't mean you all, I mean just you,
• 31:49
  Speaker 1: or I mean just you not you all over there.
• 31:52
  Speaker 1: There are larger tragedies, but nevertheless, that is one of
• 31:56
  Speaker 1: those things where oh, that is one of those things
• 32:00
  Speaker 1: where we have we have a ding like for example,
• 32:03
  Speaker 1: in French, you're driving a rental car and you're in
• 32:06
  Speaker 1: a big hurry and all the other cars are parked
• 32:08
  Speaker 1: in a line, and you pull into a space and
• 32:11
  Speaker 1: you don't really park it right, and the butt of
• 32:13
  Speaker 1: the car is kind of pushing out, so you run
• 32:15
  Speaker 1: down into the little hut and you say, I'm sorry,
• 32:17
  Speaker 1: but my car is sticking out. There's no way to
• 32:20
  Speaker 1: put it that way. In French, nothing can stick out.
• 32:22
  Speaker 1: You can say I didn't park properly, you can say
• 32:25
  Speaker 1: that the row is uneven, but if you try to
• 32:27
  Speaker 1: say the car is sticking out and I'm sorry, they
• 32:30
  Speaker 1: don't have it. Now. Does that mean that it's hard
• 32:32
  Speaker 1: to be French? I doubt it, but it would be
• 32:34
  Speaker 1: nice if they had that word. It would be nice
• 32:36
  Speaker 1: if we had a thou, or if we could use
• 32:38
  Speaker 1: y'all in the same way. Yeah.
• 32:40
  Speaker 2: So what I would like to see is the country
• 32:42
  Speaker 2: divided on this question, so there's a there would be
• 32:47
  Speaker 2: Thou districts, and then they would be y'all.
• 32:49
  Speaker 1: That would be adorable.
• 32:50
  Speaker 2: And then, because I don't like y'all to be honest,
• 32:55
  Speaker 2: I do like thou.
• 32:56
  Speaker 1: Huh.
• 32:57
  Speaker 2: I would like Thou to come.
• 32:58
  Speaker 1: Back, Thou, Thou art, Thou art reading. It just sounds
• 33:04
  Speaker 1: like somebody who died one hundred and fifty years ago,
• 33:07
  Speaker 1: but I could get used to it.
• 33:09
  Speaker 2: Is that This is another interesting language question, though, is
• 33:13
  Speaker 2: that because is that going to be as true for
• 33:15
  Speaker 2: our children? Well, our children had the same associations with Thou.
• 33:19
  Speaker 2: I mean once, why do I think I sang that him?
• 33:23
  Speaker 2: For a reason? I grew up singing that him all
• 33:26
  Speaker 2: of my associations without biblical. If we move into us
• 33:29
  Speaker 2: into a world in which people's association with religious practice
• 33:36
  Speaker 2: is vanishing, then doesn't that free us up to go
• 33:39
  Speaker 2: back and pick up a lot of that stuff.
• 33:43
  Speaker 1: It's possible. It's funny you say religious because I forgot something,
• 33:46
  Speaker 1: which is that I went to a Quaker school, Friends
• 33:49
  Speaker 1: Select in Philadelphia in the late seventies, and back then
• 33:52
  Speaker 1: there was the last cohort of teachers, Quaker teachers who
• 33:56
  Speaker 1: were still using THEE and thy and in natural speech,
• 34:01
  Speaker 1: the ones who were super Quaker as in dressing Quaker.
• 34:04
  Speaker 1: And I remember there was this one teacher who would
• 34:06
  Speaker 1: come and, you know, look at your paper and say,
• 34:08
  Speaker 1: don't get to put thy name on thy paper. And
• 34:11
  Speaker 1: he meant it straight, he didn't mean it ironically, And
• 34:14
  Speaker 1: you know part of why I don't like that, And
• 34:16
  Speaker 1: I never thought about this. You're making me think about
• 34:17
  Speaker 1: a lot of things I haven't thought about. Because one
• 34:20
  Speaker 1: day he decided to take a long trip in a
• 34:22
  Speaker 1: canoe and he happily, you know, pulled out into the
• 34:26
  Speaker 1: Delaware River, and you was talking about when he was
• 34:28
  Speaker 1: going to come back, and no one ever saw that
• 34:29
  Speaker 1: man again. And I must admit that I associate thou
• 34:34
  Speaker 1: with that man, and that is much to arbitrary. So
• 34:39
  Speaker 1: I can't laughing at this man's demise, but I need
• 34:45
  Speaker 1: to stop that. I would enjoy their being thou, but
• 34:48
  Speaker 1: I'm trying to imagine it imposed on a whole society,
• 34:51
  Speaker 1: and I cannot see my ten and thirteen year old
• 34:54
  Speaker 1: feeling differently about it. But then again, there are aspects
• 34:57
  Speaker 1: of them that I may never know. I'll ask them
• 34:59
  Speaker 1: next time I see them.
• 35:00
  Speaker 2: And what about the you mentioned this in I believe
• 35:03
  Speaker 2: in passing the English use of one, you do yes one?
• 35:08
  Speaker 2: The English uppercrust resolve this problem by if I say
• 35:12
  Speaker 2: one in the eight way that English one doesn't think
• 35:15
  Speaker 2: that does one?
• 35:16
  Speaker 1: Right?
• 35:16
  Speaker 2: What am I doing? Am I explicitly freeing up you
• 35:19
  Speaker 2: to be in the plural form? Is that?
• 35:20
  Speaker 1: What I'm doing? Well? In that case, we use you colloquially, well,
• 35:24
  Speaker 1: why suddenly can I not talk? And he had a
• 35:26
  Speaker 1: stroke that night? You colloquially, but we would actually say
• 35:30
  Speaker 1: you can't do that, can you? And so you gets
• 35:32
  Speaker 1: dragged even into that one usage which ended up replacing
• 35:36
  Speaker 1: it was originally a word mon, which was not man,
• 35:39
  Speaker 1: but it was mon, and then mon just dropped away.
• 35:41
  Speaker 1: Everything drops away in English like autumn leaves for some reason.
• 35:45
  Speaker 1: But you have the one, and you're saying, does that allow.
• 35:47
  Speaker 2: Exactly why they're doing that? Why why does the English
• 35:52
  Speaker 2: upper class use one instead of you?
• 35:54
  Speaker 1: Because you was overstretched, because not only is it used
• 35:57
  Speaker 1: in the singular and the plural, but you also use
• 35:59
  Speaker 1: it for this indefinite. Real Germanic languages, normal European languages
• 36:04
  Speaker 1: have some dedicated pronoun, as we call it, for the indefinite.
• 36:07
  Speaker 1: That's one thing that a pronoun should do. That book
• 36:09
  Speaker 1: shold have an extra chapter. In Old English it was mon,
• 36:12
  Speaker 1: then mon shortened to muh, and so you would say,
• 36:16
  Speaker 1: you know, you gotta do it, and you would say,
• 36:18
  Speaker 1: muh gotta do it. That's not very accurate Middle English,
• 36:21
  Speaker 1: but you get my point. And then it just that
• 36:24
  Speaker 1: muh flew away and you ended up being dragged in
• 36:27
  Speaker 1: for that too. We work that little word so hard
• 36:30
  Speaker 1: it's a miracle that we don't trip over our linguistic
• 36:32
  Speaker 1: shoelaces with it more. But languages aren't usually like that.
• 36:36
  Speaker 1: There's one I know of in New Guinea. It's called barrack,
• 36:38
  Speaker 1: and all they have is I we than you. And
• 36:41
  Speaker 1: then there's one word that means he she it, and
• 36:43
  Speaker 1: they one word like quack. It's not quack, but it's
• 36:46
  Speaker 1: just one thing. But we're more like that than we
• 36:49
  Speaker 1: are like the European languages that were actually related whips.
• 36:52
  Speaker 2: It's sorry to be a dog with a bone here,
• 36:54
  Speaker 2: But why don't we all use the English.
• 36:56
  Speaker 1: One in order to give you a break?
• 37:00
  Speaker 2: Yeah, because if its says or to give one a break.
• 37:06
  Speaker 1: But we can't because if you use one in that way,
• 37:09
  Speaker 1: you sound like you have a big mustachio and you
• 37:12
  Speaker 1: walk with a cane and you're in black and white.
• 37:15
  Speaker 1: In an old movie played by an actor named c
• 37:17
  Speaker 1: Aubrey Smith, one mustn't do that. It's too high.
• 37:22
  Speaker 2: As a kid, we would make fun of this because
• 37:25
  Speaker 2: my father would. I think I think he reduced this
• 37:27
  Speaker 2: locution and that he abandoned it because you're trapped once
• 37:31
  Speaker 2: you start with the one. One one doesn't think that
• 37:35
  Speaker 2: one should do that does one? And then you realize
• 37:38
  Speaker 2: this is an endless stream of ones in your future.
• 37:41
  Speaker 1: Or Fats Waller saying one never knows, do one? But
• 37:45
  Speaker 1: that was arch he was. He's saying that while he's
• 37:48
  Speaker 1: knocking back the gin. That was funny. In his real life,
• 37:51
  Speaker 1: he certainly wouldn't have said, you know, one never knows,
• 37:54
  Speaker 1: and so one, for arbitrary reasons is marked, and so
• 37:58
  Speaker 1: it has that upper crust meaning, and most of us
• 38:01
  Speaker 1: our only upper crust on occasion, and so we need
• 38:04
  Speaker 1: something more casual. And it ends up being yeah, poor
• 38:07
  Speaker 1: little you all the time.
• 38:09
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a heartbreaking chapter. It's we'll be right back
• 38:15
  Speaker 2: with more of my conversation with John mccorter. We have questions.
• 38:33
  Speaker 2: Some of these questions are really good.
• 38:35
  Speaker 1: The questions are always fun.
• 38:37
  Speaker 2: How does English compare with other languages in terms of
• 38:39
  Speaker 2: words on the move, the shifting of words meaning over time.
• 38:45
  Speaker 1: Words are on the move. That was the title of
• 38:47
  Speaker 1: one of my books. Actually, words are on the move
• 38:50
  Speaker 1: all the time in all languages. Some of them are
• 38:53
  Speaker 1: moving faster than others. But there's no such thing as
• 38:55
  Speaker 1: a language where the words just stay where they are,
• 38:59
  Speaker 1: And it can be hard to process that the words
• 39:01
  Speaker 1: are on the move because it usually not always, but
• 39:03
  Speaker 1: usually happens very slowly. But words meanings are always kind
• 39:07
  Speaker 1: of morphing. Obnoxious used to mean vulnerable to harm. And
• 39:13
  Speaker 1: so don't render yourself obnoxious by wearing too few clothes
• 39:18
  Speaker 1: to the jousting tournament, or that's not the you take
• 39:22
  Speaker 1: my point. So it only came to mean noxious because
• 39:26
  Speaker 1: it sounded like noxious, and so we now use it
• 39:29
  Speaker 1: to mean that. If you look in a grammar guide
• 39:31
  Speaker 1: in about nineteen hundred, there's always some person, the kind
• 39:34
  Speaker 1: of person who says one and has that mustache, who
• 39:37
  Speaker 1: is complaining. People are using obnoxious to mean annoying, when
• 39:40
  Speaker 1: really it's supposed to mean subject to harm. Sniff sniff.
• 39:43
  Speaker 1: We're gonna have to deal with this. This is a
• 39:45
  Speaker 1: sign of the lack of educator. And so that is
• 39:48
  Speaker 1: what happens to all words. And that's true in Japanese, Hungarian, Tahitian.
• 39:51
  Speaker 1: There's no language where that's not happening.
• 39:53
  Speaker 2: Someone would show me. I don't know if it's true
• 39:55
  Speaker 2: as a Canadian that in Quebec. The French that is
• 39:58
  Speaker 2: spoken is archaic French. So why is Quebecua French not
• 40:04
  Speaker 2: moving at the same pace as French French. So that
• 40:07
  Speaker 2: does suggest a different different languages move at different rates.
• 40:12
  Speaker 1: That's a very good question, and the answer to it
• 40:15
  Speaker 1: is that Parisian French is one thing, the French of Quebec,
• 40:20
  Speaker 1: and it's actually very similar to Cajun French is a
• 40:23
  Speaker 1: different It is a different grouping of dialects, and so
• 40:27
  Speaker 1: you can say that these things are older. But the
• 40:30
  Speaker 1: thing is that those dialects have changed a great deal
• 40:33
  Speaker 1: since they were moved over to Quebec. And the Quebec
• 40:36
  Speaker 1: dialect is very different than what it would have been
• 40:39
  Speaker 1: in say, the late sixteen hundreds and the seventeen hundreds.
• 40:42
  Speaker 1: It's just that you can still see the likenesses. It's
• 40:44
  Speaker 1: not that Quebec stayed the wall. This was and so
• 40:48
  Speaker 1: all languages move along. And the truth is, I have
• 40:51
  Speaker 1: not done a study of the Jual spoken in for example, Montreal.
• 40:55
  Speaker 1: I'm sure that that variety has changed more in the
• 40:57
  Speaker 1: past three hundred years than French standard French in Paris,
• 41:02
  Speaker 1: because written languages change more slowly. So if a language
• 41:06
  Speaker 1: is just allowed to do what it wants to do.
• 41:09
  Speaker 1: Some language in a rainforest spoken by indigenous people, it's
• 41:12
  Speaker 1: never written down. That language moves along considerably, such that
• 41:17
  Speaker 1: you might even have a little bit of a problem
• 41:19
  Speaker 1: understanding your great great grandparents. Once it's on the page
• 41:23
  Speaker 1: and your brain is kind of on writing, as I
• 41:25
  Speaker 1: put it, and you think that the real language is written,
• 41:28
  Speaker 1: then it tends to slow language change down. So what
• 41:30
  Speaker 1: we know is how language changes where when they the
• 41:34
  Speaker 1: new they comes in, we're thinking, good lord, what happened?
• 41:37
  Speaker 1: That would not shock people as much if this were
• 41:40
  Speaker 1: an unwritten language. Language changes very quickly until it's yoked
• 41:44
  Speaker 1: to the page, which is true of only about two
• 41:47
  Speaker 1: hundred of the seven thousand languages that there are the
• 41:50
  Speaker 1: idea that you think of the language in writing, and
• 41:52
  Speaker 1: then you think of speaking as just a sloppy way
• 41:54
  Speaker 1: of how it's done on the page. That's only a
• 41:56
  Speaker 1: very few languages, and we happen to be speaking one
• 41:59
  Speaker 1: normal human language gets to mind its own business, and
• 42:03
  Speaker 1: so it's faster for them.
• 42:05
  Speaker 2: What are your thoughts on Black American English being adopted
• 42:08
  Speaker 2: by younger generations in the slang they use. I'm assuming
• 42:11
  Speaker 2: this question is about by younger and in some cases
• 42:15
  Speaker 2: non black generations.
• 42:17
  Speaker 1: I think it's great, and I know that there is
• 42:20
  Speaker 1: a strain of thought that says that non black people
• 42:23
  Speaker 1: are stealing Black English features and appropriating them and that
• 42:28
  Speaker 1: there should be a line. But for one, there could
• 42:32
  Speaker 1: never be that line. That line couldn't happen, especially with
• 42:36
  Speaker 1: the mainstreaming of hip hop, and it's getting to the
• 42:38
  Speaker 1: point where you can be a thoroughly mature person and
• 42:41
  Speaker 1: not really remember when rap was listened to by basically
• 42:45
  Speaker 1: all kids. That happened really in the nineties. But once
• 42:48
  Speaker 1: you've got that and you've got that music in people's ears,
• 42:51
  Speaker 1: and just in general, I think that it's a sign
• 42:53
  Speaker 1: that there is less of a color line than there
• 42:56
  Speaker 1: used to be, and we all know that we still
• 42:58
  Speaker 1: have work to do. But there was a different time.
• 43:01
  Speaker 1: There was nineteen fifty and then there was nineteen eighty,
• 43:04
  Speaker 1: which was very different from today. And I think that
• 43:07
  Speaker 1: this business of supposing that non black people aren't going
• 43:12
  Speaker 1: to borrow what is probably the most vibrant slang in
• 43:14
  Speaker 1: the United States, it will never happen. It's actually a
• 43:17
  Speaker 1: good sign that it is happening, and it really is
• 43:20
  Speaker 1: at the point where if you're going to look at
• 43:21
  Speaker 1: how modern English is changing, which is mostly the words,
• 43:25
  Speaker 1: two times out of three it comes from either black
• 43:29
  Speaker 1: black slang or gay black slang. That's a major source
• 43:35
  Speaker 1: of our new words. And really it's a word I
• 43:37
  Speaker 1: try to avoid two words holistic because it just makes
• 43:42
  Speaker 1: everybody happy to hear the word holistic and also the
• 43:45
  Speaker 1: word dynamic. It's dynamic. What the hell does that mean?
• 43:49
  Speaker 1: But yeah, I think that black English jumping into mainstream
• 43:52
  Speaker 1: English is quite dynamic, and I enjoy watching it. So yeah,
• 43:56
  Speaker 1: I'm not giving the right answer because I know there
• 43:58
  Speaker 1: are people who think that it's appropriation. That's complicated though,
• 44:02
  Speaker 1: and I think that's an over application of the appropriation concept.
• 44:06
  Speaker 1: I think, yeah, we have.
• 44:07
  Speaker 2: To end sadly and ask you one nice question, and
• 44:10
  Speaker 2: that is one of my it's my favorite question for
• 44:12
  Speaker 2: someone like you. Let's imagine you were made language are
• 44:19
  Speaker 2: of America with absolute powers. I want you to tell
• 44:24
  Speaker 2: me the the the three language fixes you would impose
• 44:31
  Speaker 2: on all of us. We've done you, we want you
• 44:35
  Speaker 2: want y'all, We've given that to you. I want three
• 44:37
  Speaker 2: new ones and then we're done.
• 44:40
  Speaker 1: I want people to stop saying it is what it is,
• 44:43
  Speaker 1: because I find that the chilliest, most dismissive expression that's
• 44:48
  Speaker 1: got the stop. There's something, there's something pickier. You can't
• 44:53
  Speaker 1: just walk into this Roman start yelling. That's how the
• 44:56
  Speaker 1: sentence should be. You can't simply walk into this. You
• 45:00
  Speaker 1: can't just walk But everybody says you just can't walk
• 45:04
  Speaker 1: into this roman start yelling. That is now ordinary American
• 45:08
  Speaker 1: and English, and I have no right to have any
• 45:10
  Speaker 1: problem with it, but it's it's kind of like you
• 45:13
  Speaker 1: wanting the order in the monopoly directions. It doesn't make
• 45:16
  Speaker 1: any sense. It's you can't just walk in, but people
• 45:19
  Speaker 1: say just can't all the time. There was an episode
• 45:21
  Speaker 1: of The Lucy Show where somebody did it, and so
• 45:24
  Speaker 1: I know that it's not new, but it really it
• 45:27
  Speaker 1: hurts me. And then let's see what else. This is
• 45:31
  Speaker 1: one that I really didn't like when I started hearing
• 45:34
  Speaker 1: it in the nineties. Yeah yeah, yeah, people say when
• 45:37
  Speaker 1: they're having a conversation, they'll say, oh yeah, yeah yeah,
• 45:40
  Speaker 1: but they also make it in an orange color. You're
• 45:43
  Speaker 1: trying to say something, they say yeah, yeah yeah, But
• 45:45
  Speaker 1: and it sounds pushy to me, kind of like you
• 45:48
  Speaker 1: shut up and that's not what they mean. But to me,
• 45:51
  Speaker 1: it's just one one yeah. Would do. What they're trying
• 45:54
  Speaker 1: to do is take their turn in the conversation and
• 45:58
  Speaker 1: they say yeah, yeah, yeah, in the same way that
• 46:00
  Speaker 1: now both you and I probably use exclamation points in
• 46:03
  Speaker 1: our emails when we're not exclaiming anything. It's kind be
• 46:06
  Speaker 1: there in a second game. And so that that has
• 46:08
  Speaker 1: been And so now if you want to really exclaim,
• 46:11
  Speaker 1: if you want to say something like the tangerine is
• 46:14
  Speaker 1: the best flavor, then you have to use two exclamation points. Yeah.
• 46:17
  Speaker 1: So yeah, yeah, yeah is kind of long for what
• 46:21
  Speaker 1: used to be just yeah, But it's just this kind
• 46:23
  Speaker 1: of natural that it's kind of like, you know, sections
• 46:26
  Speaker 1: of DNA replicating yeah, and you know that's that was
• 46:29
  Speaker 1: a weird analogy.
• 46:30
  Speaker 2: But yeah, no one uses more exclamation marks points in
• 46:35
  Speaker 2: in email than me. You know this?
• 46:37
  Speaker 1: Are you really doing this?
• 46:38
  Speaker 2: Oh?
• 46:40
  Speaker 1: It's so exaerine.
• 46:41
  Speaker 2: It's to the point now where I think that with
• 46:44
  Speaker 2: people I'm regularly corresponding with, if I only use two,
• 46:48
  Speaker 2: they'll think that I'm mad at them. And so why
• 46:51
  Speaker 2: is not so cold today? He's cut back to two
• 46:55
  Speaker 2: exclamation So I gotta I gotta like three and four
• 46:59
  Speaker 2: that Saturday.
• 47:00
  Speaker 1: That's right, And all that is is that you're being
• 47:03
  Speaker 1: cheery and polite. Yeah, that was not the way we
• 47:06
  Speaker 1: wrote emails thirty years ago or even twenty. But now
• 47:08
  Speaker 1: I'm doing the exclamation points because I'm thinking if I
• 47:11
  Speaker 1: just have a period, it makes it look like I'm angry,
• 47:13
  Speaker 1: and that's how punctuation change.
• 47:16
  Speaker 2: You might be you, but you might well be angry John.
• 47:20
  Speaker 1: I have my days, but I would disguise it by
• 47:24
  Speaker 1: using a meaningless exclamation boy.
• 47:27
  Speaker 2: All right, one one last one for the road.
• 47:30
  Speaker 1: So it was you just can't It was yeah, yeah, yeah,
• 47:34
  Speaker 1: And then there was the what was the first thing?
• 47:36
  Speaker 1: Is what it is? And it is what it is.
• 47:37
  Speaker 1: People have got to stop that. So I would I
• 47:40
  Speaker 1: would have those three and then maybe yes, it's a.
• 47:43
  Speaker 2: Correct response to it is what it is. It isn't
• 47:46
  Speaker 2: what it is? Is that what? Yeah? But yeah yeah yeah,
• 47:49
  Speaker 2: but it isn't what it is.
• 47:52
  Speaker 1: In this case, and so you can't say that. And
• 47:55
  Speaker 1: what they're really saying is stop. It's kind of like yeah, yeah, yeah,
• 47:59
  Speaker 1: it's stop talking about that like it is what it is,
• 48:02
  Speaker 1: and therefore there's no point in dwelling on it, and
• 48:04
  Speaker 1: now let's talk about RFKA Junior or something. And what
• 48:08
  Speaker 1: I wanted to talk about was the tangerine ice cream.
• 48:11
  Speaker 1: So that's that's how that goes.
• 48:14
  Speaker 2: John, This has been great fun. This is a wonderful book.
• 48:19
  Speaker 2: You should all go and get it and give it
• 48:22
  Speaker 2: to your friends as well. And thank you for joining
• 48:25
  Speaker 2: us tonight, and thank you Jones, thank you Malca, thanks
• 48:32
  Speaker 2: for listening. Coming up on Revisionist History, an episode about Faces,
• 48:39
  Speaker 2: an episode on raccoons, and another on English muffins. Revision's
• 48:45
  Speaker 2: History is produced by Nina Bird Lawrence, Lucy Sullivan, and
• 48:48
  Speaker 2: Ben Adaph Haffrey. Our editor is Karen Chakerji, mixed and
• 48:52
  Speaker 2: mastered by Sarah Buguerer, Engineered by Nina Bird Lawrence. Original
• 48:56
  Speaker 2: score in music by Luis Kara. Our executive producer is
• 49:00
  Speaker 2: Jacob Smith. Special thanks to Sarah Nix and Gretacombe. I'm
• 49:06
  Speaker 2: Malcolm Glappa.